The Iron Crown – Part 1: The Pact

The castle stood at the end of a long, rain-dark road, all grey towers and ivy, with a drawbridge that had not risen in two hundred years and a great iron-studded door that had been oiled for the occasion.

"Tell me again why we are doing this," said Daniel.

"Because you asked me, in March, at two in the morning, whether I had ever wanted to be a queen." Isolde took his hand. "I said yes. I have been planning it ever since."

She was forty-one, a barrister, tall and composed, in a long green coat with the collar turned up. Daniel was thirty-nine, a restoration carpenter, broad and quiet, with careful hands and a look she had learned over fourteen years of marriage to read like a favourite book. He was nervous. She was delighted by it.

The castle belonged to a company that rented it for private events, with the owners miles away and the staff gone for the weekend. There was a great hall, a throne room with a carved oak chair on a stone dais, a gallery of portraits, a winding stair and, beneath the north tower, a vaulted cellar fitted out as a cell: stone walls, a heavy oak door, a narrow bed with a woollen blanket and a small barred window that let in the grey light.

"It's a set," said Daniel, looking at it. "It's a film set."

"It is the Iron Court." Isolde set down her bag. "A kingdom with a queen, a rebel and a very strict set of laws. And before we step through that door, we are going to do the most important part."

They sat at the long table in the great hall, with a pot of tea between them, and she took out the legal pad.

They talked for two hours. It was the longest, most honest conversation of their marriage. What he wanted: to be summoned, judged, sentenced, held to the queen's rules, to be made to wait and to be corrected. What he did not: anything that left marks, anything that humiliated him beyond the game, anything in front of other people, any real anger. What she wanted: to take command, to be formal and merciless in the court and gentle outside it. What she would never do: leave him alone behind a door he could not open. The cell latch was fitted on both sides. The key hung on a hook inside, where he could reach it.

"The word," said Isolde.

"Lantern."

"If you say it, the Queen vanishes. Isolde is here. We sit down. We have tea. There is no argument, no guilt, no 'but I was enjoying it'. We stop, and we talk."

"And if you say it?"

"The same. That works both ways." She wrote it at the top of the page and signed it, and he signed beneath. "And every half hour, the Queen will ask you, in the old tongue of the court, whether the rebel is content. You will answer truly."

"Content, Your Majesty," said Daniel, trying the phrase, and went pink.

"Very good." She stood, and the green coat fell open on a gown the colour of old wine, with a heavy silver circlet in her hair. Her voice, when it came, was a different instrument, low and level and absolutely sure. "The court is in session. Kneel."

He knelt on the cold flags of the throne room.

"You stand accused," said the Queen, from the dais, "of the crime of insolence against the Crown. How do you plead?"

"Guilty, Your Majesty."

"Then the court will hear your sentence at dawn. Tonight, you will learn what it is to wait." She looked down at him, and for a moment, behind the silver, Isolde's eyes met his and asked, silently: content?

"Content," whispered Daniel.

Continue the story: Part 2 – The Sentence.